Monday, March 27, 2006

California Students Carry the Torch

Is it possible to be hopeful and angry at the same time? I'm learning quickly how to do it.

The national media was unable to keep a lid on the big story of the weekend: tens of thousands of people marching and rallying for human dignity.

Today, Monday, is Cesar Chavez Day in California, and students across that state are showing their solidarity with their familias y amigos by staging mass walk-outs. From CNN:

Tens of thousands of students walked out of school in California and other states Monday, waving flags and chanting slogans in a second week of protests against legislation to crack down on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, California's Cesar Chavez Day, at least 8,500 students marched out of eight Los Angeles-area schools, including the San Fernando Valley and the wealthy coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades, said Monica Carazo, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district.

By midmorning, the protests had spread to downtown, where hundreds of students walked the streets and chanted. The boycott had the tacit approval of school officials in some of the heavily Hispanic downtown schools, where word was passed through hall posters and public address systems.

Reading the aftermath of the blog coverage on the protests, I read a term I had never heard before: anchor babies. After figuring out what the goons were talking about, I was utterly disgusted at the spitting hatred shown by some people towards another human being.

An "anchor baby" is a child born from immigrant parents, and is apparently caused-to-be born for the sole purpose of providing leverage to keep the parents here. That pesky XIV Amendment to the Constitution, it causes all sorts of hell...apparently......

That whole notion is not only insulting and degrading, it is reminiscent of days past when the lunacy was coming from the Oval Office.

Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting deceased husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. Reagan continued to use his version of the story even after the press pointed out the actual facts of the case to him.

Disgusting. I hope the marches and rallies continue to spread across this country until the bigoted groups still operating in the U.S. are either forced back into their holes to fester and rot or they end up leaving and poisoning some other country with their hate.